Standardizing the ORF Financial Request Process
CLIENTS:
NIH Office of Research Facilities (ORF)
Content
Ripple Effect standardized the financial reporting process for the Office of Research Facilities (ORF), which manages NIH’s facilities and oversees large financial budgets for building and other large-scale NIH projects. To keep track of these budgets, ORF uses multiple financial tracking systems and a centralized database that pulls the system information into digestible reports for employees. Originally, there was no formalized process for tracking staff requests for financial reports, which led to unnecessary duplicate reports and inaccuracies in reporting. Ripple Effect’s goal was to standardize the request process, increase quality control, and make it easy for employees to get quality report data in a timely manner.
We created a new, comprehensive business process to standardize report requests. We mapped out the process flow of a request, created a standard operating procedure and written report request requirements, built a SharePoint employee request system, and created a quality control checklist to ensure the accuracy of manually entered data. Altogether, these resources created a formalized process for employee report requests that benefited not only the client, but also the Ripple Effect employees asked to pull the report requests. Ultimately, this work led to positive feedback from the client: “Tracking [our] work this way and being able to refer people to these different requests is great; we need to do more of this at ORF in general.”